There are quite a few applications available that produce audio from imagery. Whether it’s photography, or computer generated graphics the results can be fascinating. For further exploration an article that describes eight programs that convert imagery to sound called Say it With Pictures is available on emusician.com. An additional application that I’ve been looking at recently called Photosounder has the unique capability of allowing you to manipulate sound in its image state. This creates a whole host of effects from time stretching to flipping the sound upside down creating a bizarre, inverse, reflection of the original sound. For this example I used Photosounder to process the sound from More Memory Man Madness. A few of the adjustments I made were the rotation of the image, the gamma property, and pixels per second.
Memory Man Through Photosounder
It’s a most bizarre and intriguing sound you’ve obtained here John! By the way I’ve just released a new version of Photosounder (the original download link I gave you should still work) which supports exporting the current image to an image file, so all sorts of effects on sounds can be done in your favourite image-editing program. I believe that opens a whole new range of possibilities.
Also, may I interest you in sounds made from images created for the very purpose of being listened to? I’m working on making instruments (mostly drums) in Photoshop and I made a video showing how to create a drum beat that way http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbyWINZLUco&fmt=18 , hoping that’s of any inspiration for your future experiments ;-)
That’s fantastic, Michael! You read my mind. Soon after first experimenting with Photosounder I wondered what you could do by manipulating the “sound” of an image in an image editing application like Photoshop. In fact, I did a bit of experimenting by taking a screen shot of a male voice in Photosounder, then bringing it back in. Sort of an example of the copy of a copy experiment.